Reading the Musharraf riddle

Musharraf’s fate will have a huge bearing on Pakistan’s political economy. Source: Reuters

The sight of the famous commando panicking and fleeing the Islamabad High Court premises when the order to arrest him was issued somehow will remain etched in memory as the final account of Musharraf.

The Boston
Marathon bombing rudely pushed to the sidelines everything else in the world
media attention. However, in the long term, the fate that awaits Pakistan’s
military dictator and former president Pervez Musharraf will have far greater
impact on regional security in South Asia than anything that happened in a very
long while.

The common
perception in India is that Musharraf’s fate is “sealed” and that for once his
chutzpah failed to work. The Indian commentators are revelling at the
dictator’s discomfiture and are narrowly focused on it. The Indians somehow got
an entrenched opinion of Musharraf’s personality as a curious “mix of bluff,
bluster, swagger, insouciance, candour and above all, duplicity,” as a leading
commentator wrote in a Delhi newspaper this week.

There is
perhaps an element of truth in this perception, because Musharraf’s political
personality had an erratic streak in it at times. But it is equally possible to
say that there was always the tantalising scope to discern that there could be
some method in his madness, too. We may never know. At the end of the day, the
Indians didn’t really try him out on his out-of-the-box formula for a Kashmir
settlement.

The sight of
the famous commando panicking and fleeing the Islamabad High Court premises
when the order to arrest him was issued somehow will remain etched in memory as
the final account of Musharraf. The court of course intended to humiliate him
in public and to most onlookers, including the Xinhua news agency reporter, it
appeared to be “poetic justice” that a dictator’s nose was being rubbed in the
dust.

However, on
closer examination, which is always advisable when it comes to the under-currents
in Pakistani politics, doubts arise about what is really happening, and the
events begin to acquire a surreal look. In Pakistan, once an army general, you
are always a general. They belong to a brotherhood. They circle the wagons at
the slightest inkling of a challenge to their corporate interests.

Suffice
to say, considering that all this is so very obviously a high-stakes political
game, it is impossible that Musharraf didn’t sound out the army leadership in
Rawalpindi about his intention to return to Pakistan. Equally, it is
inconceivable that he defied the advice that was forthcoming from Rawalpindi
and chose to return nonetheless come what may. That is, assuming that he never
bothered to consult the authorities of the country of his exile, Britain, or
the Saudis and the Americans who were his mentors and well-wishers through
thick and thin for a decade.

Clearly,
Musharraf factored in the ‘x-y-z’ possibilities that awaited him in Pakistan,
including, most important, the wrath of an unforgiving judiciary, which he
treated disdainfully. And yet, if his fate – political and physical – was in
mortal danger, he nonetheless estimated he could be certain that the present
army leadership wouldn’t let him be flushed down the toilet just like that. The
events, which are still unfolding, suggest that he wasn’t really far off the
mark here. What gave him this confidence?

Thus, the
question that begs an answer is what is the game plan of the Pakistani army. No
one from the army has spoken. But enough indications are available even from a
close reading of the Pakistani media that the army leadership in Rawalpindi
will find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to countenance a situation
where a 5-star general is treated like dirt. Indeed, truth and reconciliation
are difficult to reach in Pakistan when that country’s history is as tumultuous
as it is, and the entire political class (and the judiciary and the executive
as a whole) has been compromised at one point or the other.

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Thus, as a
perceptive Pakistani journalist of the Dawn newspaper Anwar Iqbal wrote in the
weekend, while there is great temptation to lock up Musharraf in the same cell
where Nawaz Sharif was kept (whom he overthrew to usurp political power in
1999) in Pakistan’s notorious Attock Fort and let snakes and scorpions into his
room so that he too cries out in pain, or handcuff and shackle him and parade
him through the streets of Karachi and Quetta, or do unto him “what they did to
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir and Nawaz Sharif”, there is also at the same time
a growing body of opinion slowly gaining dominance through the cacophony of
revenge calls, which cautions that “ground realities must not be ignored, after
all, he is a former army chief and the military obviously will not like this
humiliation.”

A dress
rehearsal

However, it
is not a mere question of the military’s perceived “humiliation” that is at
stake here. Interestingly, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the well known
aristocrat-cum-politician from the heartland Punjab province with a consistent
history of soldiering tirelessly for the military’s interests has already
raised his voice that the trial of Musharraf should not target any specific
institution of the state. Of course, he meant the Pakistani military and it is
doubtful if the feudal lord could have spoken without prompting.

In sum,
Musharraf’s fate will have a huge bearing on Pakistan’s political economy. In a
way, it is a dress rehearsal of an impending struggle for civilian supremacy in
Pakistan that the new elected government, which by all accounts will be headed
by Nawaz Sharif, can be expected to spearhead.

Put
differently, the profound significance of the events of the past week lies in
that the struggle for civilian supremacy has truly begun in Pakistan and its
consequences are going to be far-reaching for India-Pakistan relations, for
Afghanistan and for regional security in general.

To be sure,
there will be hiccups on the way, as the Turkish experience also shows, but the
democratisation process is bound to gain strength incrementally in Pakistan
even if the current round may seem an uneasy deuce. In Turkey, over 300 Pashas
are currently sitting in jails and yet life moves on, although hardly three
years ago, this would have seemed a preposterous thing to happen.